The Mission Pine Trail

Blue skies, green hills, a gentle breeze, and sweeping views.  We've had such a warm, dry winter in Southern California this year, I had almost forgotten what springtime hiking felt like! We got just one good storm this whole winter, which dumped probably the majority of the year's rainfall in just 72 hours.  The result of that was both good and bad for hikers.  Good because it replenished dried-up backcountry water sources, but bad because it caused some mudslides on a nearby highway, which prevented us from accessing the trailhead for the hike we had been planning for several weeks.  But our Plan 'B' backup picked up the slack nicely.  We headed out to a remote corner of the San Rafael Wilderness, walking the famed "Mission Pine Trail" - which, in local legend, is the locale where Franciscan missionaries from Spain cut the timbers for the Santa Barbara mission in the early 1800s.  This ridgetop trail offered us far-ranging views north to the Sierra Madre Mountains and south to the distant Pacific. One of our party, Mark, has been on a mission of his own - to bag the hundred tallest peaks of Southern California - and this trip allowed him to tick off numbers 62 and 63 on his list, since our trail took us to the 6,182' summit of McKinley Mountain and the 6,593' summit of San Rafael Mountain, the second tallest peak in the Santa Barbara backcountry.